The Fragile Earth: Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change

A classic collection of the New Yorker’s most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergencyIn 1989 | just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history | thanks to humankind’s heedless consumption of fossil fuels | New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet.At the time | the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now | McKibben’s work is heroically prescient. Since then | the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change | describing the causes of the crisis | the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in | and the scenarios and solutions we face.The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change – its past | present | and future – taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains | and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades | including Bill McKibben’s seminal essay ‘The End of Nature |’ the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience | and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert | as well as Kathryn Schulz | Dexter Filkins | Jonathan Franzen | Ian Frazier | Eric Klinenberg | and others. The result | in its range | depth | and passion | promises to bring light | and sometimes heat | to the great emergency of our age.